


Under the Stone

by mehramilo



Series: In the Valley [1]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Dubious Consent, Enemies to Lovers, Fight Sex, Flashbacks, Hand Jobs, M/M, Obsession, Post-The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Snark, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, Timeline Fuckery, brief OC appearance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-29
Updated: 2018-03-29
Packaged: 2019-04-14 07:21:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14130996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mehramilo/pseuds/mehramilo
Summary: Years after restoring Temeria, Vernon Roche returns to Flotsam in search of two bastards.





	Under the Stone

**Author's Note:**

> Roche never struck me as an emotionally intelligent guy.

 

_flotsam, evening_

Roche is five cups in before he realizes he’s found her. The girl’s dress is finely made, green as the spears of marsh grass along the river and neatly stitched at the hems, though matted at the hips from so many greasy hands. Must turn a decent trade even a place like this. Her face, dusted with flour to conceal the spots on her cheeks, blooms moon-pale as she turns to the fire to stir the coals. A ring of wilted flowers slouches over her brow. He has little experience with children, but her ungainly hunch tells him she must be young. He starts to count the years since Foltest’s death to guess her age—then cringes and stops before he passes ten.

Had it really been that fucking long?

He takes a long, solemn drink instead.

Another whore saunters between and blocks his view, mistaking his narrow gaze for interest. Her breasts, lumped atop her bodice, sway as she seats herself on the bench alongside him, straddling the plank with her knees spread to either side. “Well, don’t you look fine,” she lilts, pawing at the Nilfgaardian black on his sleeve. A lie—and a poor one at that, considering he hasn’t bathed since he stepped off the boat hours ago. “We don’t often see your sort here in Flotsam.” She leans close and cups Roche’s knuckles on the hewn tabletop. The red stripes on her cheeks bend as she smiles. “You lost, handsome? Let me help find what you need.”

Roche pulls his hand away to lift his tankard. “That girl,” he says, tilting his cup toward the one he’d been watching. “Does she work here too?”

The whore sits back with a huff. “Oh, aye. You want her instead? You lot always like to pretend you’re her first.” She catches the dark-haired girl’s gaze and makes a series of hand signals; the girl glances at Roche—at the gold sun stitched on his breast and the silver chain around his neck—and taps two fingers against her open palm. “She’s free,” the woman says to Roche and heaves herself away from the table hard enough to slop his drink onto his lap.

Roche crosses to the corner where the girl lingers in a shadow. He shivers at the way her eyes light as he advances—though he feels filthy for it immediately afterward. It’s just been years since anyone looked at him like that, as if he were something to be desired. But when he follows her gaze and realizes she’s just ogling the heavy purse belted at his waist, the feeling sours into something even more sickening than before.

She looks up with her mouth twisted to the side, as if she can taste the stink on him. “What’re you after?” she asks.

“Only to talk, somewhere away from all this.” He flicks a glance at the men huddled over cards and dice, slopping drinks on the grimy floorboards as they crane to paw at the passing women.

“Still cost you silver for the time.”

A wild ask for a place like this, but Roche gives her gold and nods at the stairs.

She goggles at him a moment, the coin clasped before her like a child’s first offering at the temple—then remembers herself, secrets it in a pouch strapped to her thigh, flounces past with her curls swinging. Doesn’t bother to offer change. “This way,” she calls to him over her shoulder.

A twinge in his right knee slows him on the stairs. By the time he reaches the room at the top, she stands facing him from the other side, framed against a chipped panel the color of winter sky. She pinches her tongue between her teeth as she picks at the knots along the front of her dress.

“Don’t,” Roche snaps.

She drags one string loose, then hesitates. “Sir?”

“Come closer,” he says, still frozen in the doorway.

She slips forward, holding the folds of bodice closed against her chest. “Don’t sell aught like that in town,” she says as she draws near, touching the Temerian medallion around his neck, her lips slouched apart in stupid wonder. “You a lord or something?”

“Of a sort.” He watches her fingers creep along the chain to his chest—then turns to her face, examining her wide mouth and jaw, the cheekbones mounded like barrows under her eyes. Didn’t have the fortune to get her mother’s. He plucks a piece of her hair from her shoulder, twists it around his knuckle: black, like his. “Beautiful,” he says, because she expects it.

A pleased blush bleeds into the apples of her cheeks. “A lord and a flatterer, no less,” she says, palming his jaw, trying to draw him into her embrace. Her other hand slides to the front of his doublet; she slips a finger under the hem to stroke the clammy shirt beneath. “My name’s Anne. What should I call you tonight, my sweet talker?”

He plucks her hand off him and forces it against her stomach hard enough to stagger her back a pace; her eyes, stretched white like cornered prey, roll toward him as she steadies herself against a corner of the bed. Her mouth splits as if to scream. “Enough,” he snaps, then sucks in a cold breath to quench his temper. “I think—” He swipes the sweat from his upper lip to hide a cringe behind his palm. “I think I’m your father.”

 

***

 

_that morning_

Roche knows the ship has come ashore when the ale steadies and begins to slip side-to-side in the harbor’s gentle waves. He downs the last of it, tosses the cup in a corner of the dank cabin, and rakes the hideous attire of the new North off over his head. Doublet, ruff, too many fucking buckles. The ridiculous puffed shoulders sigh like deflating bladders as he wads the fabric. He stuffs this in the trunk at the foot of his bed and drags out the musty gambeson he’d tucked in the bottom instead. The fabric is faded after so many years in storage but still blue enough to lift a smile off him as he unfurls it.

He’d last worn his Blue Stripes gear to the treaty signing with var Emreis, huddled in a circle of Nilfgaardian forces in the needling rain just outside Vizima’s gates. By the time the officers had finished clucking their formalities, he’d been soaked through to the skin, his coat turned black with wet. When he’d returned to camp, he’d stripped it off and hidden it from sight, still sodden and slick with mud. Like no more than bloodied rags.

He shrugs the jacket on, forces his fists through the stiff cuffs, smooths some flaking grime from the shoulders. The lace crackles as he threads it through the grommets and pulls it taut against his sternum. A little tighter around the waist than when he was younger. A moss of ripped stitches at the shoulder where the Temerian badge was stolen off him so long ago.

He averts his gaze, wondering—not for the first time—just what the fuck he’s doing here.

He glances back at his trunk, then pries open the drawer secreted in the bottom and retrieves the stained velvet purse tucked inside. He tips it over. The chain slithers free; he catches the medallion in his palm and grips it until his knuckles blanch.

His chain of office, pledged to a man long dead; the lilies moldered, green with tarnish. A meaningless thing now, but he knows he’s not recognizable without it. He remembers once—a lifetime ago—staring into the whites of his own eyes, reflected off the polished tiles of Vizima’s throne room, as Foltest laid this around his neck; now, he ducks through the loop and carelessly drops the links atop his shoulders. The badge thumps like a punch atop his heart as he stands.

Through the leaded porthole over his pallet, Flotsam’s shoreline is as strange as a channel carved on some distant moon.

He thinks to straighten his cap and resettle the chaperon and check his reflection in the flat of a blade. He touches the furrows along the sides of his mouth—then sighs and shoves the dagger away in its sheath. It’s the best he can do.

Roche steps out onto the deck and shoulders through the press of men darting starboard to bow slinging ropes and calling orders to the shore. Has to narrow his eyes in the wan sunlight after being shut up for so long in the creaking darkness. He crosses the gangplank into the sucking bog and squelches over to the captain. Though he carries a parchment stamped with the Emperor’s seal commanding free passage on any vessel sailing the Pontar, he presses a handful of orens into the man’s waiting palm without bothering to count them.

“Take our things to the inn,” he orders the boys nosing along the shore for work. He scatters yet more coin in the dirt for the children to scuffle over in payment.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Roche turns and finds Ves staring at him, looking greener than she ever did aboard the ship.

“Charity,” he drawls, as if he has no idea what she’s talking about. “These scoundrels look like they could use a proper meal.”

She drops her pack at her muddy feet and pinches the front of his coat to examine it. “Is this—”

 _More visible in the forest_ , he thinks. “Nilfgaardian insignia will draw too much attention in a place like this. Go to the inn; get some rest. I just want to look around.”

He shoulders through the marsh grass toward Flotsam’s gates before she can ask more of him.

 

Ves had been the one to insist he return after all this time.

“Do it now,” she’d told him, “or you’ll soon be too soaked with booze for them to let you aboard any ship. You’re near a fire hazard.” She studied him over the edge of the girl’s letter, her eyes as sharp as chips of bluestone. Post-war Vizima hadn’t softened her as it had him; she still barked like an officer, still sat up slamming shitty vodka with him as if preparing herself for a night’s patrol. Her only concession to city life: she now kept her chest covered in fine clothes to stave off gossiping housewives in the market. Roche snorted.

Ves narrowed her eyes at his meandering gaze. “Near too senile from the look of it, too,” she said. She lofted the parchment back to him across the table. “I’m not sure your old bones could even manage it.”

“I’m not _that_ old,” he snapped, watching the page drift to the spattered floor. “Just unmoved by this sob story.”

Ves sighed, reached across as if to touch his hand—then pulled back, still too drilled in military propriety for such comforts after all this time. “Roche,” she said, gentler now, trailing a finger through the condensation beaded on his tankard instead, “you’ve nothing left to do here. It’s driving you mad.”

“I’ve plenty to do.” He knew she was eying the stubble spreading like unchecked mold across his cheeks, the surest sign he hadn’t been summoned to the palace in ages. He raised his cup to hide behind it. “Besides, there’s word of a post opening in—”

“Please, you know better. It’ll go to one of their own, just as it always does. The Black Ones have never trusted you.” Her voice slowed to the languid cadence used when talking to an invalid: “Temeria will live on without you if you leave for a time. It’s only a short trip on the river to see her. This could be a new purpose, even, something to fight for again. Just like old times.”

He huffed a mirthless laugh. “A quest to find my very own surprise child, is it? Maybe I’ll wind up with a vineyard like Geralt, too.”

“You’re a bloody idiot.”

Ves hunched over her drink like flames flattened in the gassy wind exhaled from the depths of a cave. He knew if he ordered her to leave she would still obey, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“I have no interest,” he finally said, ducking his chin and scuffing his thumbnail into the crumbling tabletop like a scolded boy. “I’m not sure what else you expected. I’ll not come running simply because some whore’s claimed the child’s mine.”

“I imagine that’s what your own father said, too.”

Roche cut his gaze up to meet hers—then scraped his chair back hard enough to strike the table behind and topple the candle. His shadow rushed up her face as he stood and loomed over her. “You fucking dare—” He beat a fist against the tabletop hard enough to jump his tankard.

Ves had known him too long to fall for this. She just looked bored.

Roche slumped back in his chair, ground the heels of his palms into his eyes, and said into his lap, “You know I can’t parent a ploughing teenage girl.”

“No, but you can go give her some coin. Get her out of the whorehouse, at least. Maybe set her up a place of her own there in Flotsam. I’ll even come with you, if you’re too afraid yourself.” When Roche lowered his hands, he found Ves watching him with a wry smile. “Besides,” she added with a laugh, “maybe that Squirrel’s wandered back in the forest there again. You could always kill him while you’re at it.”

Roche glanced aside. “I put all that behind me long ago,” he said. But, in truth, only ever dared to turn over that stone in his mind when profoundly drunk.

“Please, Roche.” Ves finally ventured a touch, clasping his wrist as if to brook any argument he might make through force. “I know you’ll regret it if you don’t.”

When he’d finally said “I’ll go find the bastard,” Ves hadn’t asked which one.

 

“You,” Roche barks at the pimply guard leaning against his pike by Flotsam’s gates. “You serve on watch here?”

“Nah,” the boy drawls and spits at his feet. “I’m just ploughin’ decor.”

Roche grinds his teeth until they creak, considering just how much weight Emhyr’s name would carry if he were arrested for assault. No more than a flea’s balls, most like, despite this city now falling under the Empire’s control. He sighs and continues in a more measured tone: “Have there been any reports of attacks lately? Deaths in the village? The forests here were once rancid with elves.”

The boy juts his chin toward Roche in a toothy sneer. “Stick to the paths and you’ll be fine, old man. Naught but nekkers out there these days. Now are you going inside or no?”

Roche touches the sword at his hip but leaves it sheathed. Turns his back on the idiot and the city before he changes his mind.

He follows the dirt track past the squat huts of Lobinden, spread farther from Flotsam’s protection than he last remembers. Guard platforms dot the canopy but stand empty, the boards rotted and coated in flaking lichen. Men, unconcerned with how far their voices carry in the trees, sing as they chop wood and haul it to the sheds. A woman scraping a skin pauses to stare at him as he passes, her grip white on the hilt of her crescent blade, though she is the only one to note the stranger in their midst. The fear that once cloaked the city has tattered over the years.

He stops atop a hill overlooking the river to survey the valley (and, if he’s honest, catch his breath). Gray waters gyre through the jagged shoreline, coated with a film of mist like wraiths. The bearded hills sigh, thick with grass where once they were trampled flat under scouts’ boots. Roche squints and looks for smoke where the Squirrels liked to build campfires but finds the horizon smoked only with rainclouds. He shoulders through a line of fronds and presses deeper into the forest.

He follows a stream to a squall of a lake checked with slimy lily pads. A dragonfly zigzags through the marsh grass and alights on the surface; ripples spread on the water like smirks. Once, he would’ve found some she-elf scraping linens clean in the shallows; now, the scum lies as plush as a blanket on the water, undisturbed for quite some time. He presses his arm over his nose to block the stench and stalks west.

He wanders into the clearing before he realizes he’d been heading toward it. Ringed by towering trees, trapped in a dollop of amber sunlight, splashed with violet shadows underneath. Just as he remembers, after all this time. He pauses, holds his breath, and listens to the thunder of the river, the drone of cicadas in the marsh, the whisper of mists slipping through the grass. But just underneath, he swears he catches the sound of leaves hissing and branches sighing as they’re swept aside by an arm. The sensation of being watched shimmers down his back.

“Show yourself,” he calls, then flinches when his voice bounces back to him, as shrill and urgent as an unbearded boy in his first fight.

Crows clatter through the canopy, cawing their displeasure at being disturbed by his hollering.

Silence drifts down around him in their wake.

Roche has little practice in admitting defeat even in the face of such obvious truths. He allows himself a moment to steep in the illusion that he is not truly alone anymore.

The humid air settles on the back of his neck in a chilly scum as he stands, so he drags out his sword and swings it a few times to warm his limbs. He snicks the fuzzy catkins off a cluster of nodding willows. Then, he sighs, slumps back onto a fallen log to sit. Spins the point of his sword in the dirt and watches his reflection flash on the flat of the blade, split in two by the fuller.

Just what had he expected after all this time?

He slits his gaze and glowers up into the canopy as if he will find Iorveth there, still couched in the fork of the tree, watching the horizon for his passing.

And, finally, he allows himself to think of the day this whole fucking disaster started.

 

Roche had been searching for the kingslayer’s trail outside Flotsam when the arachas struck—slashed him across his back, staggered him to his knees, jarred his blade loose somewhere off into the sedge. Must’ve been cloaked, waiting for some prey to come nosing through the wood. He just managed to roll aside before it speared him; a talon lanced the dirt inches from his skull. He clambered to his feet, swept a hand through the grass in search of his sword—but, finding nothing, hearing the thing’s shell creak as it reared for another strike, he just ran instead.

Thunder drummed against his back as the giant barreled after him. Roche plunged through the snarled hedge and dove between two tree trunks into a clearing, hoping to throw the beast off-course. It still snicked at his heels. He sucked for air, trying to form a call for help, but he knew his men were too far to be any use. And Geralt—well, probably busy ploughing the sorceress.

He staggered, clapped against the damp earth; the air whined as the beast sliced just above him. He clambered forward, slipping on the grass, the squealing wet leaves. If only he could make it through the meadow to the cliffs, drop out of the monster’s reach, maybe land in a tree below to break his fall—

Then, some sort of white wisp bloomed in the canopy ahead, hissed as it streaked through the leaves, and flashed over Roche’s left shoulder. A sickening crack—the arachas began to squeal and stamp behind him. Roche glanced back, then stopped and turned to watch.

An arrow had sprouted in the center of the thing’s fringed beak, sunk nearly to the white fletching. The arachas sloshed black blood across the clearing as it thrashed and pawed at the wound. Another arrow thunked into its carapace along one of its back legs; it scuttled sideways, chittering in pain. Another arrow whined past its shell, and it swiveled around and fled.

Roche hunched, braced a hand on his knee, gulped for breath. He touched the small of his back, only now realizing it was soaked with blood.

“I hope you don’t think you’re safe.” A voice from the trees above.

Roche breathed a curse and heaved himself upright, staggering slightly. He knew that mocking sneer all too well. “Iorveth,” he spat, squinting as he raked the treeline in search of the elf. “Show yourself, if you’re not too afraid.”

“Says the _dh_ _’oine_ I caught fleeing for the shelter of his warren.” Iorveth stepped from the canopy’s embrace, balanced on a silvery branch arched over the clearing. “A shame, really, when you were so close.”

Roche felt his intestines come unspooled as Iorveth nocked another arrow on his bow, aimed at the center of his chest. “Why waste the arrow?” he snarled, trying to hide his fear behind coarse bluster. “The beast would’ve just killed me if you hadn’t stepped in.”

“You should be more grateful,” Iorveth said, as if scolding a child. “This—” he nodded at the arrow, the pale feathers as stark as a brand against his red headscarf “—is a far quicker death than that of arachas venom.”

Sweat crept along Roche’s jaw like beads of quicksilver. He flexed his fingers, desperate for a sword, though he knew it would be little use with Iorveth so far away. At this distance, the elf had but one weakness: his pride.

“You’d shoot an unarmed foe while hiding in the shadows like this?” he called. “Typical shitty elven honor.”

Iorveth laughed. “‘Honor?’ And what would your kind know of that?” But the arrowhead had drifted from Roche’s heart, now pointed at the dappled grass at his feet.

Roche forced his shoulders up in a disdainful shrug. “I know how to kill a man without resorting to pathetic tricks. Can’t say the same for you, Squirrel.”

Iorveth jumped from the tree and landed among the gnarled roots with a spray of dirt. Roche thought of running but decided he wouldn’t grant the elf the satisfaction of shooting him in the back. Instead, he dug his heels into the soft earth as Iorveth advanced across the clearing. If the elf came close enough, maybe he could manage a punch, just enough distraction to get a blade off him.

Iorveth stopped three paces away, slung his bow, and raked his two swords from their sheaths. Held them up as if presenting the mystery of fire to a primitive. One, he lobbed to Roche hilt first, who snatched it out of the air on reflex. “Satisfied?” he sneered. “Will it comfort you to die knowing my conscience is clear?”

Then, he lunged.

Roche just managed to get his sword between them in time to catch the blow and sweep it aside from his face. Iorveth swirled his blade back in position and circled behind; Roche hauled his up far more slowly and scraped his feet as he turned, still fatigued from his sprint. Strange pain boiled in the small of his back and furled pennants of fire through his chest, but he gritted his teeth and ignored it.

Iorveth flashed another cut at Roche’s side. His face lit with wicked glee when Roche twisted to deflect it, revealing the crimson smear along his back. “You couldn’t dodge that lumbering insect?” His voice shimmered with mocking laughter. “You’ll have little chance against me.”

But the next swing came slower, well within Roche’s reach.

So it was this game again: Iorveth’s cuts aimed to itch like fresh ink under the skin rather than kill—the kind that seeped into Roche’s dreams, stained them a glassy red, woke him in the middle of the night when he rolled on them.

Roche sighed. He was so fucking tired, his limbs so heavy his heart may well have been pumping syrup. His hips drifted drunkenly when he tried to brace his stance. Death would’ve been easier than this. But he couldn’t let the smug son of a bitch just win this unimpeded.

“Surrender, elf.” His voice fluttered as he tried to stand upright. “Make this easier on yourself.”

Iorveth pressed his lips closed in feigned solemnity. “A tempting offer.” Another strike glanced off Roche’s blade. “And just what do you intend to do with me if I turn myself in, Roche?”

Roche blinked, flexed his grip on the hilt of his sword. With Foltest dead, he had little idea just what the fuck he was doing anymore. “Flotsam will have its justice,” he finally said.

Iorveth threw back his head and barked a laugh. “Is that what you tell yourself? You hardly sound convinced.” His lips peeled back in a cruel smile. “No, I think a different purpose drives you out into the forest, alone, time and time again in search of me. You—”

Roche barreled forward, clanged his blade against the elf’s, grunted as he tried to press it past his hold—then yanked free of the cross and staggered back several paces, his vision gnawed black at the edges. Blood sloughed down the backs of his thighs. He tried to catch his balance and shove off his back foot, but his calf juddered and crumpled beneath him as suddenly as if the muscle had been snipped from the bone. He slumped onto one knee, then two. Staked his sword in the dirt to try to hold himself upright, but his palm slipped off the pommel. He hunched. His arms hung at his sides, his chin against his chest, all weighted with some feverish ballast.

He slurred, “Make it quick, then.” Suddenly, the ground flashed up to meet him—he was facedown, sucking breaths through the soggy grass. His mind had fissured; he no longer knew quite where he was. He heaved himself onto his back and gaped at the shimmering canopy as if seeing it for the first time.

A silhouette blotted the sky over him, bladed ears gleaming red along the edges in the sunlight. “I did warn you about the venom, Roche.” Laughing.

He tried to say “Fuck you,” but his consciousness clapped shut before he could form the words.

 

Roche drifted up from the void. Flexed his fingers, felt the tendons in his wrists slide against his forehead. Facedown on his forearms, his coat and chaperon lumped underneath in a sort of pillow. A knife in his throat as he swallowed, his mouth tight with an astringent taste. Ground wheeling beneath him.

He was too fond of drink for waking up like this to be new to him. Problem was, he hadn’t expected to wake at all.

He rolled his head to peek alongside, found he was stretched prone atop a bedroll on the floor of a cave, the hem of his shirt rucked up around his shoulders like a whore’s skirts. The air was heavy with the scent of yarrow, thick enough to taste the spice. One of the first things he’d learned in the army: the smell of the bruised leaves steeped in oil, slathered on wounds to staunch bleeding. It was the scent of war, but a strangely comforting one, more reminiscent of the muzzy darkness of medics’ tents than of the killing fields. He watched motes of dust drift like embers in a shaft of bloody sunlight across the cavern, wondering how he’d gotten here, how long he’d slept, how long he had left before—

A stabbing pain in his back fractured this thought. He winced and craned to look over his shoulder.

Iorveth sat alongside him with his legs folded, one knee slouched against the back of Roche’s thigh. A bone needle pinched between two slim fingers, sewing the cut along Roche’s waist with narrow black stitches. The horsehair shimmered as he pulled it taut through each loop.

With his blind side facing Roche, Iorveth didn’t notice his gaze; he continued working in silence, with his lower lip dragged back under his teeth in a look of boyish concentration. Roche almost laughed at the fucking absurdity of it, but Iorveth pushed the needle in again, and, instead, he sucked a gasp through his teeth.

Iorveth tilted a glance at him. “Still alive, then,” he said. “Good to know my supplies weren’t entirely wasted.”

Roche held his breath as he watched Iorveth pluck the needle and draw it through the other side of the wound. Pain flared along the edges, crept like a flush along his spine. After so many years of service, Roche’s drive to endure and sense of pleasure were so intertwined as to feel a perverse thrill as Iorveth laced the final stitch through his flesh and dragged the lips closed.

Then he spent a sigh and said, “My men will never pay you a ransom.”

“That glad to be rid of your incessant barking, are they?” Iorveth laid the needle aside, reached for a pair of shears, and snicked the tail of the thread between the blades. “I can’t say I’m surprised.”

“We don’t treat with terrorists; you know this, Squirrel. And they’re loyal. They’ll stand by this command no matter the cost.” Roche’s vision smeared as he turned his head away and laid it on his arms, watching their silhouettes shiver on the wall in the flickering torchlight. “So just fucking cut my throat and be done with it, will you?”

Iorveth’s shadow lipped the line of Roche’s back as he bent over him; Roche braced for the strike, flinched at a sudden pressure below his ribs—but it was only a rag pushed over his bare skin to mop up the blood. His eyes slumped shut in relief.

“So quick to surrender yourself, Roche?” Iorveth swept a stripe of heat across his back. “A trait you must’ve picked up from your mother.”

But Roche wasn’t truly listening anymore. His mind had softened like wax in the heat of his fever and congealed somewhere in the base of his skull, too thick to shape into coherent thought. He found he no longer cared if he saw the cut that killed him, just wanted to sleep again. For a moment, he imagined he was stretched atop a pallet in the hush of the Temerian barracks—felt his hips tilt, the cloth forced across the point underneath—then slipped loose in a wave of exhaustion.

 

When next he opened his eyes, shadows blanketed the cave like drifts of black sand. Moonlight bled through the mouth and limned the stone fangs along the ceiling in orange light. His chest, nettled by the stone beneath the thin blankets, tingled as if someone had scraped nails along it. His shirt, wilted with sweat, sucked at his skin.

Roche hauled himself up onto his hands and knees—then lurched and clutched at the floor. Still drunk from the decoctions he’d been fed to combat the venom.

The smell of blue smoke and sun-warm resin reminded him who had brought him here. Where he was.

“So this is your pathetic little den.” Roche swiveled his head to survey the cave: the fingers of nitre creeping down the walls, the supplies heaped atop a hewn table across the room, the bramble of animal bones in the corner. “I’ve seen fucking ratholes finer than this.”

And Iorveth lounging beside, pipe clipped in his mouth, a lit rush touched to the bowl. His face awash in light the color of Belleteyn fires as he dragged in a breath. The flame snuffed with a flick of his wrist. He reclined against the wall and rolled his head to look at Roche. Smoke curled between his teeth as he sneered: “Not even a ‘thank you’ before you start in? Then again, your kind always think this sort of treatment is owed them. I should’ve just left you to feed the necrophages.”

But he held out the pipe to Roche in offering, with all the casual intimacy of soldiers returned from some long war, threaded with the same hurts through the muscle. Black to the wrist with Roche’s own spoiled blood.

Roche batted away his hand. His head spun, drooped, threatened to tip into darkness as he pushed himself upright. “Why am I here?” he rasped, chafing his unbound wrists. Meaning: still alive.

“Call it kindness, if you like,” Iorveth said, and sloped his face away. “The mark of a higher species: feeling pity for helpless beasts such as yourself.”

“Right, the noble race who shit and bathe in the same waters. I hardly believe it.” Roche studied the crescent of bare skin above his collar, unprotected. He hadn’t even bothered with armor. “So—what, then? You’ve dragged me here just to listen to your chatter? Are you so desperate for company, you miserable son of a bitch?”

Iorveth swept his head back, lofted a plume of smoke with his tongue. Sweat glistened like starlit frost in the hollow of his throat as he laughed. “Take better care when choosing your insults, Roche. Is there a man alive who’d bother to bury your corpse, let alone mourn it?”

Geralt, perhaps, if Ves contracted him and provided the shovel. “Many,” he snapped after a moment’s hesitation.

Iorveth’s canines dimpled his lip as he grinned.

Humiliation scalded Roche, slipped through his veins like some new poison. He clambered forward into Iorveth and clapped against him, scraping shoulders and knees as they spilled aside onto the sandy floor. The pipe skittered across the room, trailing cherry embers.

Iorveth, loose-limbed in surprise, spread beneath him as they rolled. Roche grappled him at the clavicles, tried to force his fingers closed around his throat—but he was weak, and Iorveth’s skin slick with cave damp. His grip swept off like no more than fumbled groping. Arms snarled between their chests; a thigh worked between that jostled Roche’s hip with every swing. Roche trapped the elf’s wrists as they spilled free, ground the bones in his fists as he pinned him beneath. His abdomen dipped against Iorveth’s as he panted. He loosed one hand to crack the elf across the unblemished side of his face and drive the heel of his hand into his nose. Iorveth’s neck swept open, his skull wrenched aside; a splash of crimson streaked the dirt.

Blood, seeping from Iorveth’s left nostril, beaded like honey along the bow of his lip. Roche, blaring with adrenaline, ached around the lance of sadistic pleasure run through his gut.

Iorveth snarled, raked Roche’s face, grasped him by the jaw. Dug his fingers into the hollows of his cheeks as he pressed him back, forced him to bend, to sit back on his haunches. Iorveth’s chest grated the insides of Roche’s thighs as he sat up to appraise him: face aflame, ribs jutting with each labored breath. His stomach, his chest—Iorveth peeled him back to the viscera with his gaze. Then he leaned close, scraped the flint of his nose up Roche’s neck to find his ear, and hissed: “There are better ways to show your gratitude to me.”

The realization punched through Roche like a shot of ink in water, curling as it scraped walls deep inside.

He jerked his head, tried to shake off Iorveth’s grip. “So that’s your scheme, then?” Mad laughter bubbled out of him as the elf wrenched his chin in warning. “You thought to hide it behind snide comments, but you’re not so clever as you think.”

“Ah, the typical torturer’s routine,” Iorveth drawled, though his cheek had ripened to the color of his inflamed scar.

Fingers of sweat inched down the small of Roche’s back and touched his wound, but he hardly felt the pain anymore. “All this, just for the chance to fuck a human? Pathetic. Not that I can blame you—I’ve seen your women. Uglier than a boar’s cunt, the lot of them. But what will your elders say when they learn of this obsession—that the savior of their dying race spent all his reproductive efforts on but one man?”

Iorveth’s vulpine leer contracted in rage; Roche’s lips peeled back in a vile grin.

Then, the flash of a hand, a clap against his temple—thrown back by the punch, Roche hit the wall behind him hard enough to thrum his skull.

“A monstrous ego, even for a _dh_ _’oine_.” Iorveth held his hand up before him to casually inspect his knuckles, but his fist rattled when he gripped it. “Made from the same blighted flesh as the rest of your species—you think I desire that? Sleep off the drink, Roche; you’re speaking madness.” He heaved himself to his feet and turned his back on him.

Roche slumped against the cave wall, touched the bloom of heat on the side of his face. Watched Iorveth sweep through the supplies piled atop the table across the cave, tip a skin over his palms to wash away the grime. His body a dagger in silhouette, pulled to a point at the hips. The arc of his spine as he bent to cup water to his bloodied nose. Rivulets running off his bare arms and pattering in the dust at his feet like a sheet of summer rain.

Roche willed the ache in his gut to subside.

His cock throbbed in time with his cheek.

He wedged his heels beneath him, drove back against the stone to brace himself, walked his scapulae up the wall until he was half-standing. Knees fluttered as they took his weight, sagged; he scraped the heel of his palm as he caught himself. Hovered like this a moment, churning with anger, with indecision, with some black purpose he couldn’t name. Without knowing what he intended to do, he shoved off and staggered toward the elf.

Iorveth turned a moment before Roche hit, eye stretched white—caught the collar of Roche’s tunic as they collided, wrenched it to him as he folded, sat back heavily with Roche plastered to his chest. Struck the tabletop behind hard enough to jump the pots of salve and pitted daggers laid there, to send the nails and notched arrowheads and shards of quartz tumbling to the floor.

Roche slapped him—not hard, a confused sort of strike that landed flat, spread into a shivering clasp around the base of Iorveth’s skull. He dragged the elf flush against his chest, then clenched his eyes shut as he fell forward into him.

The scrape of teeth as mouths met blind. A kiss ground against lips pressed flat.

Roche threaded his fingers in the hair laid along the back of the elf’s neck beneath his scarf and pulled. Iorveth opened to him with a small pained sound, split his teeth to let Roche press his tongue into the hollow behind, to suck the blood from his upper lip as he drew away again.

Roche opened his eyes.

Iorveth wore a narrow expression. “You stink like a corpse,” he sneered. But the fine hairs along his arms stood gilt in the torchlight, and Roche felt him shiver.

A clangor in Roche’s skull warned of tomorrow’s shame. A pang of desire shot through him and choked off the sound.

Roche stooped, urged Iorveth’s jaw aside with his nose, clipped his teeth along his neck. Wet the skin with his breath as he panted against him. Felt the muscle slide under his tongue as he sucked bruises through to the surface, pleased to leave his own shameful marks on the elf for a change.

Crickets chirred outside the cave. Inside: slick sounds, the whine of the table beneath their shared weight as Roche rocked forward and discovered that Iorveth, still feigning disinterest, was as stiff as he was.

Roche stole the elf’s hand and forced it between his own thighs. Grated his knuckles as he molded his palm on his cock. Had meant to make some cutting remark as he did it; only managed a strangled sort of _yes_ as Iorveth’s fist closed around him. Iorveth bit Roche’s bare shoulder where his damp-heavy collar had drooped open as he kneaded his cock roughly through his trousers.

Roche prised Iorveth’s jacket open and raked it aside from his hips. Smeared another kiss against his jaw as he shoved his hand beneath the waist of Iorveth’s leggings and grasped his slick cock.

Iorveth’s eye went slouched, drugged, as if he’d been slipped poison. A sign of distress that only made Roche stroke harder.

Then a burst of frantic pressure as Iorveth tried to free Roche from his trousers, but all the inborn grace of the elves had fled him; his fingers slipped on the ties in glancing strokes that only fed Roche’s anger. A ridiculous sort of slapfight when Roche tried to help him—his hands on top, then Iorveth’s, clawing at each other as they searched for the knots, fighting for petty dominance even here.

“Fuck, just—” Roche flung Iorveth’s hands aside and raked his laces open, then turned on Iorveth and dragged down his leathers to bare him to the thighs. Discovered the elf was brown even here, crossed with no pale lines but scars—that he must lounge in the sun sometimes, stripped and vulnerable. Roche secreted this information away for future inspection: the inquisitor’s habits put to perverse use.

They came back together with the weight of a fight: blows now falling as messy strokes, punches landing as open-palmed pawing from the free hand. Roche ground his teeth to trap the pathetic sound coiling in his throat and worked in flushed silence, trying to force the elf to crack first.

Iorveth’s face creased as if he were in pain when Roche twisted around the head—fuck, that alone was enough to make him come. Roche turned his gaze away, instead staring at the wall behind to focus. Dew glittered along the jagged stone, so like the dust Geralt had shown him once, cupped in his palm like a smattering of stars, that could turn even the dullest blade to a headsman’s edge. He thought of the gallows in Flotsam, the greasy rope slung over the beam, looped to fit—

Iorveth’s neck, now stretched beside his, chest pressed against his so that Roche felt the hum in his own ribs when Iorveth made some stupid sound of pleasure, a reedy whine pushed up through his nose. Roche had studied the elf for years, knew his body, his tells—knew the way he carried weight through his hips when he fought and the way his face listed to the right as he spoke. And now this—fuck, now this, too—

Iorveth, as if sensing weakness, stirred and pressed his mouth to Roche’s ear. “Is this how you earned your chain from Foltest?” he hissed. “You seem practiced.” And wrenched Roche’s cock as if to scold him.

Roche spilled a senseless curse and flung his skull back against his shoulders. “You son of a bitch,” he said through his teeth, then came so hard he shook.

 

He stumbled back to Flotsam with hands clutched to his stomach and the small of his back like a traitor run through with a sword. Overhead, the stars died one-by-one, pinched between fingers of dawn.

He reached the city gates just as the sun slivered over the horizon. Billets pinned to the signboard chattered in the wind. Iorveth, daubed in black ink, leered at him from every one. He knew Ves waited for him to report at headquarters, but he stumped past the building without daring to look.

She, of all people, would recognize the scent on him.

Instead, he shouldered through the door to the inn and clattered downstairs, clinging to the wall with both fists like a drunkard. Knew of no better place to shrive himself than the whorehouse. Found a ring of girls huddled over a pile of cards, still drinking from the night before. Shoved coin at the first who didn’t look askance at him: a slip of a thing with dark hair cropped short.

If she happened to have green eyes, too—well, there was no accounting for chance.

She led him back to her room, then swiped his hands off her waist. “At least wash first,” she sniffed, mistaking the bloody crust on his neck for dirt. Roche bent over the washbasin in the corner and found the water had gone cold; it bit him as he palmed it against his cheeks and his chest. Trembling hands shimmered his reflection on the surface of the water. Purple crescents on his throat, clipped short where the bastard was missing teeth. His cock stirred again. He turned back to the girl and displayed his clammy skin. Still felt unclean, but she nodded anyway.

He forced her over her own dressing table. Didn’t bother to remove her dress, just held the folds of her skirt up between their hips as he pressed inside. She braced her hands on the tabletop to shove back against him, fingers splayed amongst the spray of coins and pots of paint. A memory, then, of his mother swiping the kohl from her cheeks as she cried. He clenched his jaw and fucked harder, though it made him ache. Tried not to think. Came inside just to prove he could.

That, he now knows, was when he made his daughter.

 

Vertigo swoops through him when he suddenly stands. Too warm, his skin tight with the feeling of sunburn, greased with a film of sweat despite the chill. Things he thought long buried boil free, pool in his joints like something toxic—a feeling he has no other name for than anger, felt as sharply as the gentler sentiments that bled ink from poets.

He shakes his head, trying to scatter these memories, but only dredges more loose: the times after the cave, the hum when pressing lips against skin freshly struck, the way his teeth sang when they scraped bone underneath. Iorveth's body framed in the slatted shadows of the cell; the madness traded in the dark. High in the mountains, laid in the grays slants of winter light: the way snowflakes withered on the back of his neck, the taste of frost they left behind. And the last time they’d parted: blights of ash drifting in the narrow space between, a river of smoke streaming overhead. A fitting end to this—the sort Dandelion would salivate over. No reason to pick at it.

Yet here he stands in this stinking bog, still carrying this secret embedded in him like a splinter of bone, stupidly expecting fate to dole out just one bit of luck in his fucking life, just one last chance to—

He misses when he tries to sheathe his sword and scrapes his own thigh instead. He flees the clearing with his blade still drawn, his hand tremoring on the grip.

He returns to Flotsam’s gates with his weapon brandished, but finds a grey-haired lump in place of the mouthy lad from before. He tucks his sword away, feeling foolish.

“A Temerian, eh?” the old man says, tipping his pike at Roche’s medallion as he approaches. “I remember when Vizima fell, I do. Had family there myself. Dark days, dark days.” He scuffs at an itch on the back of his head, spilling from the seams in his piecemeal plate like dough as he bends. “A different land now that the Emperor and his folk is in charge. But must be good to have something like the old back again, anyway.”

“It is,” Roche lies, then shoves past hard enough to stagger him.

He hunches his shoulders against the humid fug and curious stares as he stalks across the square. Merchants bawl at him from their stands as he passes, brandishing their goods. Sacks of clotted flour, sagging tallow candles, clothing that went out of fashion in the capital years ago. Roche ignores them and elbows through the press of bodies toward the inn.

Outside the door, two dwarves crouch over an overturned barrel, their hands splayed against the mouldering wood, thunking the point of a dagger in the vees between their sausage fingers. He lingers a moment before heading inside, watching their knife game, considering if he’ll allow himself to venture one last question to these idiots. Then thinks the fact that he’s even in this wretched heap has already decided he’s sunk low enough for it not to matter.

One dwarf stops with the blade wedged between his index and middle finger and slaps his fellow on his bare shoulder, nodding at Roche looming behind him.

“‘The fuck d’ye want?” the other dwarf says, heaving himself upright and turning his head to spit against the wall. “Come for a fight? You’re looking at Flotsam’s champion.”

“A pretty chain,” mutters the other, swiping his bloody knuckles against the front of his already stained tunic as he stands. “Think I fancy me one of those.”

Roche holds his hands up, shows his empty palms in what he assumes is a meek gesture. “I’m just looking for someone.”

“I bet y’are.” The dwarf flicks a jab at Roche’s abdomen and chortles as he sidesteps it into a puddle. “Lonely, are yeh?”

Roche’s mouth puckers like he’s taken a shot of vinegar. “A male elf. Ugly son of a bitch. Missing half his damn face. Surely, you’ve had some word of him around here.”

“A sword for every sheath, eh?” He elbows his companion. “Brothel’s downstairs. I’m sure you can find your type in th—”

Roche launches forward and digs his forearm against the dwarf’s trachea, pinning him against the wall with a dull thump. Plaster crumbles and snows on the dwarf’s curling pate and beard. “The Scoia'tael,” he barks. “If you’ve any word of their movements—”

Behind him, a snort. He turns to find the other dwarf clutching his belly as he laughs. “What ploughing hole did you just crawl out of? Not been Squirrels ‘round these parts since the war, you _bloede_ fool.”

Roche’s grip goes slack like he’s taken a bolt to the chest. He leaves one dwarf coughing and sputtering in the mud, the other shaking his head in disgust.

“Temper like a sow with a pike stuck up its arse,” he growls as Roche slams through the inn door. “Fucking humans.”

 

Roche finds Ves in their rented room, perched on the edge of her pallet, chipping caked mud from the sole of her boot with a knife.

“You were gone quite some time,” she says, glancing up as he stumps in. “Any news?”

Roche swipes his chaperon from his head and daubs his face with it. “Lobinden’s a heap of shit,” he finally says into the piled fabric. “The locals are as friendly as ever.”

Ves chuckles. “So nothing’s changed.”

“No, not a thing. Not a fucking thing.” He listens to the rumble of men drinking in the taproom downstairs, the whore keening through the wall to the left, the man grunting and the headboard clacking in time with her; outside the window, the patter of urine in the grass, snatches of song as the locals stumble home; and, farther off still, the sound of wind slipping through the hollow hills. “It was a mistake to return.”

“I swore I’d never come back. This is the sort of place that drives a man mad. Not sure why I keep letting you talk me into this shite, Roche.”

He grimaces and pinches the bridge of his nose. “There’s a boat leaving for the capital this week; I’ll see that you—”

A stirred breeze tells him Ves has crossed the room, now stands opposite him. “Don’t be stupid; I was only poking fun. Of course I’m not leaving you. That hasn’t changed either, you know.”

His heart jolts like a raft struck by a rogue wave when he feels Ves touch him, sliding her palms along his arms as if to embrace him.

When he says nothing, Ves grasps his shoulders, urges them gently. He opens his eyes and finds her watching him with a strange expression. “You should get dressed in your nicer things before you go meet the girl, or she’ll just think you’re some vagabond. You’re a mess.”

Roche’s face prickles with shame. He turns away. “I suppose you’re right,” he says as he begins to unlace his gambeson. “No one in this town knows who the fuck the Blue Stripes were, anyway.”

“I think that’s for the best,” she says. “From what I’ve heard, you have to watch your back around that lot. A wretched bunch of bandits.”

He thinks she meant it as a joke, but neither of them laugh.

 

***

 

_evening_

“You got my letter, then,” Anne says, twisting a fold of her skirt.

Roche slopes through drunkenness straight into a hangover, slumps onto the bed, and clasps his skull between tremoring hands.

“A merchant came through town,” she continues as though he answered. “Said he travels the Pontar every summer to sell his wares, that he’d bring it to you in the city. He’d heard of you before—seen the palace when at market in Vizima, once. Said you were some jumped-up soldier who’d got a deal off the Emperor. Fought in the war long ago.” She arches a brow in question.

It’s the fairest assessment of his career he’s ever heard. Roche spews a single dread laugh.

She sits beside him gingerly. Forces straw up through the mattress that pricks his skin. “The other girls said to leave you well enough alone—that someone of your sort’d never recognize a brothel’s get.” She darts a glance at him, then shakes her head. “But I—well, I don’t expect coin or no such thing from you. I just…wanted to see, you know?”

He nods.

“Is that why you came all this way, then?” She ticks a tear from the corner of her eye, trying to hide it from the stranger beside her. “You wanted to see me as well? To know who I am?”

He thinks of Anaïs and remembers to take this girl’s hand. He pats it once, too hard for comfort. Knows only how to hurt. “I did.”

“Truly?”

His mouth, sliced in a smile. “What other reason could I have to come to a place like this?” he says, staring over her left shoulder. “There’s no one left here but you.”

**Author's Note:**

> I have no practice (or business) writing sex scenes. Hope no one cringed hard enough to rupture something important while reading.
> 
> Any sort of feedback is appreciated, as always.


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